The quarrels with the Orientals, which I shall perhaps relate more fully by and bye, have again thrown a clear light on the existing condition of things and the maxims adhered to. In a dispute about the privileges of a Convent here, an Armenian Archbishop with his secretary and interpreter were condemned by the Inquisition to imprisonment in one of the Jesuit houses—nominally “to make the exercises.” The unfortunates for whom this fatherly correction was decreed, were to “exercise themselves” till they were reduced to submission. They first betook themselves to the protection of the French embassy, but in accordance with instructions from Paris they were repulsed. Then they were taken under the charge of Rustem Bey, the Turkish ambassador at Florence, who has lately been residing here and transacting business with Antonelli. But the Cardinal soon intimated to him that Catholic priests, of whatever nation, were in Rome simply subjects of the Pope and under the jurisdiction of the Inquisition. So the helpless Armenians had to succumb, and were favoured with domestic imprisonment, while a monk of another Order was made Abbot of the convent. The affair has naturally excited double astonishment. German, French, and English priests, who are here in great numbers, have had the unpleasant surprise of discovering that, according to the theory accepted here, they belong not only spiritually but bodily to the Pope, who is the absolute lord of their persons, and that the Inquisition can seize and incarcerate any of them at its pleasure. And the occurrence has recalled some very unlovely reminiscences. Men acquainted with Roman history have shown that Paul V. got Aonio Paleario and Carnesecchi to surrender themselves and had them burnt by the Inquisition; that Paul V. enticed to Rome by a safe-conduct the priest Fulgentio, who took the side of the State in the Pope’s quarrel with Venice, and had him burnt there as “a lapsed heretic;”(76) that the English Benedictine Barnes, who was seized on Belgian soil and dragged to Rome, was first imprisoned in the Inquisition till he became insane, and then had to die in a lunatic asylum. It is true that the Inquisition no longer inflicts torture and death, but nobody who has once come into its power would escape without having an abjuration extorted from him. The best security for a Western priest consists in the dread of the _Curia_ of involving itself in trouble with his Government; were it not so, a foreign clergyman would be compelled to confine his conversation with clerics here to the weather, for there is always the most stringent obligation of denouncing any one the least suspected of heresy to the Inquisition, and a German clergyman, who got into any theological talk could hardly avoid that suspicion, so many would be the points of difference and opposition.